Walking Bones

Walking Bones is an American love story cast in deepest noir. It’s the story of a black woman named Nettie who came to New York to be a model but grew too big and ended up as a designer. One night in a bar, Nettie meets a man, a drunk white man named Albert Press. He insults her, she smashes a glass in his face. And so begins a strange, twisted kind of love affair. It becomes a lurching dance of black and white, sadist and masochist, that can only ever end in disaster. Like Chester Himes’ The End of a Primitive, this is an American tragedy that unpicks the sexuality of racism and the strange contradictions of sexual power. The characters attempts to redefine and surmount considerations of race are to be seen as a kind of folly and a kind of beauty. Their attempts to negate those same considerations are made at their inescapble peril.